4 Ways Food and Beverage Brands Can Stand Out With Event Marketing

We have worked with many food and beverage brands on different events throughout our 25 years. While sometimes a sample of a product is enough, that isn’t always the case…especially when you get into larger brands that are more well known. Engaging with consumers requires your brand to stand out with event marketing.

The goal is to interact with consumers in a way that is memorable to them. A sample of your product may not be as memorable as an entire activation. In order to stand out with event marketing, you have to do something different.

Our Experience

Here are a few things we’ve seen and done with food and beverage brands in recent months:

These are brands that stand out through their activations, and not because of their brand name. Many of these events focused on engaging consumers through games, taking photos, and providing something of value for consumers. You might also notice that a lot of food and beverage brands team up with sports teams to engage consumers. It’s an obvious connection and works well for both parties.

Food & Beverage Event Highlights

Not only are our clients doing some cool things with their food & beverage brands, but we’ve found some activations that have worked for others as well. From these examples we can learn a few things to help your brand stand out with event marketing.

Here are 4 things you can do to help your brand stand out in event marketing:

1. Virtual Reality: Use the latest trends to generate excitement and share your new product(s). Fuse and Mountain Dew leveraged their NBA partnership to build product brand awareness. Before and after select NBA games large images of NBA athletes drew fans in to a tent that allowed them to experience virtual reality street basketball. While this virtual reality wasn’t a virtual drinking Mountain Dew experience, it connected with this particular audience the right way and created a memorable experience they’ll likely tell others about (and share on social media). Check out what they did here.

2. College Brand Ambassadors: Use ambassadors on college campuses to spread the word about your brand. We recommend this if – and only if – your target audience is college students. This wouldn’t make sense if you’re targeting moms, but there are many food and beverage brands that want college students to know about their brand. Starbucks did this and did it well. The audience made sense for their brand, and they took it up a notch by sending mobile cafes to these campuses. Check out the full case study from Fuse here.

3. Mystery and Exclusivity: Make something people want to know about and be a part of. Patron created a secret society and relied on consumers to get the word out. This not only connected with consumers that were part of the secret society, but made it something people wanted to be a part of through the exclusivity. Watch the video here.

4. Offer Value: Rather than just sampling products, Campari taught consumers how to create the perfect cocktail. It provided more value for consumers and was much more memorable than just giving a sample. Check out the activation here.

Stand Out with Event Marketing

While these are food and beverage examples, many of them can work for other industries as well. The most important thing is to be memorable and develop relationships with consumers. That can only be possible with the right event staff in your corner. If you have an upcoming event, we would love to chat. After 25 years in business, we have seen a lot of success.